The great American data centre divide

TLDR

• Residents of Archbald, Pennsylvania are fighting six proposed data center campuses that would cover roughly 14% of their 7,000-person town.

Key Facts

• Six data center campuses are proposed for Archbald, a small Pennsylvania town of approximately 7,000 residents.
• The combined footprint of the proposed campuses would cover about 14 percent of the town’s total land area.
• Developers are pushing AI infrastructure into rural communities that are increasingly pushing back.
• The conflict puts rural opposition at odds with White House priorities around AI infrastructure expansion.

Why It Matters

• A small town’s resistance illustrates a broader tension between national AI infrastructure ambitions and local land-use concerns.
• Rural communities becoming sites of organized opposition could slow or reshape where data center development is feasible.

Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Susannah Savage, Bob Haslett, Zehra Munir, Eva Xiao — Financial Times · 2026-04-28 · Read the original